Mr. Dobolina - specifically, Mr. Grob Dobolina - bounced hard off of Alan Wake. He didn't like The Mind Place. Or anything really! To compare and contrast, I spent four hours fixing my computer so I could play it as the developer intended. There's a delta there.

At least, where I'm at now, the way the mechanic works is this: you occasionally glean clues from your own experiences and observations, things that people say, or objects of various kinds. The "Case Board" in your "Mind Place" is like the traditional, Pepe Silvia-style crazy wall with the pins and string, but it's not really possible to put things in the wrong place. You also have an ability - introduced very early, so I don't feel bad talking about it - to "Profile" people you meet, but this "Profiling" isn't really something you interact with as a player. They're essentially impossible leaps of deduction bordering on psychic power. Their purpose of these things isn't really to be gameplay, they just want to communicate information to the player, but there's another universe where these things operate in a way players can access.

I was telling him that the Sherlock Holmes mystery adventure game thingies actually do things like that, and it plays for keeps, because it's possible to be wrong about shit in a way that you're both confident in and feels like canonical Holmes. It's stressful as hell. I can see why they didn't fuck with that.

For my part, I think I'm probably obsessed with Alan Wake II. Once I was able to chase the fucking devils out of this machine, I'm at the comfortable point on the 3080 where I'm tentatively increasing visual fidelity and it's mostly kept up. I think I'll be done with it soon enough to discuss it in full here, but as somebody who grew up in places like much of this game is set in, this game renders a kind of damp cold that anyone from The Pacific Northwest can recognize instinctively.

Hey! Time is short to consume the entirety of Seattle By Night's Season One before the show's incredibly on-brand return from the dead.

Season Two of Seattle By Night debuts tomorrow - Tuesday, October 31st, or as witches know it, Halloween. Stop by twitch.tv/pennyarcade at 5pm PT to get this new eight episode season kicked off right. We get into some shit. That's all I'll say.

(CW)TB out.